


Rebirth to Rebloom

by Yiffandquiff (princesslexi763)



Series: Bingo Fic Fest 2019 [2]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Angst, Anxiety, Fluff, M/M, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 20:43:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20748461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princesslexi763/pseuds/Yiffandquiff
Summary: Dan Howell met Phil Lester while they were still in high school when Phil was helping him out. But as time went on, they lost touch when Phil graduated, and they never speak. Dan thought of him often and hung onto his crush all these years until Phil shows up at the flower shop he works and asks for Dan’s help arranging flowers for his daughters birthday.





	Rebirth to Rebloom

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @phandomficfests Bingo Fest prompts used were: anxiety, second chance, and writers choice (flower shop au). 
> 
> If you want to see my Bingo Card,[click on this link!](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cpNPwCZP4l9iG_fBUgZIJoRhvILQnJm3/view?usp=sharing)

Dan first met Phil freshman year of high school. Phil was the graduating senior who had full control over Dan’s seminar class to help the freshman kids adjust to being in high school. Phil was just really kind to Dan. Dan felt like he held Phil in a higher position of trust than he held any other authority figure in his school. Phil was someone that Dan genuinely looked up to.

Throughout freshman year, Dan wished he was able to grow closer to Phil but the truth was that it just didn’t ever happen. It wasn’t some dreamlike scenario where Dan grew close to Phil and then Phil grew close to him and sparks flew. In fact, it was much more of the opposite.

Dan knew he had a crush on Phil pretty early on. He hadn’t come to terms with anything to do with his sexuality and frankly, that crush scared him. He didn’t know why he was looking at Phil differently than he looked at girls. He didn’t know why he suddenly begin to daydream about what it would be like to have Phil hug him or even hold his hand and…_kiss him. _He didn’t know why he was even thinking about all of this but suddenly he began to realize that his crush was definitely a crush and _fuck _he was beginning to get head over heels crazy about Phil.

One day after freshman seminar, Dan asked Phil if he could talk privately. Phil had gleefully accepted and hurried the other students out of the room so he and Dan could talk. Dan doesn’t know what struck him to want to talk with Phil about this but he does.

When Phil sits down in front of him, Dan blurts out what he’s been wanting to say. “I think I might be gay.”

At first, Phil’s eyes went a bit wide and that made Dan nervous but then Phil’s expression softened and Dan realized that he was in no real trouble by admitting this. “There isn’t anything wrong with that,” was Phil’s response.

Dan felt so relieved that Phil wasn’t saying anything differently about Dan’s admission. There was just something that felt so much more relaxed.

They spoke for a half an hour following that. Dan got out all of his feelings and Phil just listened and gave advice where he could. And Dan honestly—and maybe a bit selfishly—waited to see if maybe, just maybe, Phil would say something about his sexuality too.

And he did. But not what Dan wanted to hear.

“My girlfriend Alyssa is bisexual so I’m sure if I told her about your sexuality struggles, she would be really grateful to help you out! I can even have her message you on Facebook if you want.”

Dan’s heart shattered in that moment. He tried to hide how sad and broken that confession made him with a smile and a thankful nod as he hurriedly made some excuse that he needed to get out to meet his mom in the parking lot. That wasn’t true—Dan always walked to school.

When he got halfway home, he stopped on the sidewalk and dropped onto a curb and let out a few muffled cries into his arms. He shouldn’t have gotten so worked up about Phil. He knew it was never going to happen but yet, it still hurt to hear that anyway.

He got up after a few minutes and made his way home where he told his mom he wanted to be alone for the night and he headed up to his room. Two hours later, more tears came as he saw he had a friend request from both Phil and Alyssa on Facebook.

He accepted both and then turned his phone off.

The rest of freshman year was difficult with seeing Phil every other day for seminar. But eventually he got over his unrequited crush and on the last day of freshman year, he even gave Phil a hug and congratulated him on graduating.

Dan thought that that was the last time he’d ever see or hear from Phil. But little did he know that his chance to be friends with Phil would could again nearly ten years later.

***

Dan maneuvered through the shelves of his flower shop, picking up flowers and placing them back into their respective containers. He didn’t technically own the store, but he sometimes feels like he does with the amount of work he does here.

His friend from high school, Gina, decided to open up a flower shop in their hometown right after high school and while Dan didn’t originally have any say in the shop, Gina eventually talked him into working here. So Dan’s degree in philosophy went into a bin for later and he instead put on a green apron and a pair of elbow high rubber gloves.

Dan knew next to nothing about flowers but after working there for three years, he’s beginning to know a bit more every single day…even if Gina isn’t here all that often. Although, Dan can’t entirely blame her. She does have a three year old son and she is a single parent so he does understand it. He can’t imagine how tough it must be but on the rare chance that she brings in Lucas to the store, he loves chasing the little tot around the aisles.

This day was like any other for the store. Dan opened it so Gina could take Lucas to the doctors and then he spent his morning rearranging flowers and putting together new arraignments to put in the window display. He hasn’t had any customers in person but they have a few online orders that he needs to have ready for tomorrow so he’ll work on those sometime this afternoon.

He’s still working on fixing up one of the flower displays on the shelf when the bell over the front door rings and Dan stands up from his kneeling stance and brushes his soiled hands on his already stained apron.

Dan makes his way, weaving through the aisles until he finds himself coming to the counter. He instinctively picks his head up and begins to say “Welcome to Gina’s, how can we help you?” when he’s suddenly cut off by the attractive male standing with his back to Dan. His hair is black as a raven’s feathers and he’s wearing a red bomber jacket with black skinny jeans and Dan instantly stops in his tracks.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out as he smoothes down his clothing and reaches up to try and fix his tangled curls. He hopes he doesn’t have any dirt on his cheek or some shit that could look embarrassing.

The male turns around and flashes a smile and then Dan realizes who it is.

That’s Phil. Senior Phil who Dan was hopelessly in love with in high school.

“Oh my god.”

Phil’s blue eyes widen and he’s squinting a bit underneath his glasses. “Dan?”

“Phil?”

“Hi!” Phil says, walking forward and pushing his car keys and phone into his pocket. “Wow, this is unexpected. It’s been so long.”

“I know.” Dan says, feeling a blush begin to creep up onto his cheeks.

“How have you been? How was high school?”

_Pretty shit. I was bullied nearly every day my senior year after I came out via a Facebook post but that’s okay because I managed to be salutatorian and that counts for something. _“It went okay.”

Phil reaches up and rubs the back of his neck with his hand. “High school is pretty shit, to be fair.” He says. “College was a lot better.”

Dan scoffs. “That’s the understatement of the century.”

Phil laughs and Dan watches as his tongue sticks out from between his teeth and suddenly Dan is being hurled back into his high school days where he was crushing so damn hard on Phil.

“So you’re probably wondering why I’m here,” Phil begins with a chuckle. “I actually need some help. So my daughters birthday is in two days and I have nothing for her party but she loves anything to do with flowers so can you help me pick some out for her?”

Dan feels the smile fall from his face as he tries to hide his sadness. Phil has a daughter. That probably means his ended up marrying Alyssa and having a child with her. And that means Phil is definitely straight and Dan’s dream of rekindling his crush is immediately flushed away.

Dan nods with a painful smile and then motions for Phil him to the counter. Dan bent down and pulled out a book of flower meanings that Gina had left for him to look over and he opened it up to the tab that read ‘for children’.

He immediately sees that Lily’s are listed and Daisy’s are too so he looks up at Phil and points to them. “Lily’s are actually symbolic of daughters so if you want to give her a flower that not only looks pretty but also is a deeper meaning for her, that is your best choice. But daisy’s are good too if you wanted to do a mix.”

Phil looked at them and then nodded with a smile. “Remi would love lily’s honestly. I’m sure she would absolutely adore having them for her party.”

Dan smiled at Phil and then closed the binder and pulled out an order form from the slip that Gina had next to the register. “We can fill out an order form then and you can give me a pick up time and date and I’ll have them ready?”

Phil nodded quickly and smiled in relief at Dan. “That would be amazing, Dan. Remi is going to love them.”

They quickly filled out the order form and Phil put down that he would pick up the flowers at 9am that Friday and while the store doesn’t open until 10:30, Dan would be willing to come in early to supply Phil with the flowers he needs.

“Thank you.” Phil says, handing Dan his credit card when they begin to process the price for the order. “I seriously thought I was going to be screwed with how last minute I was but time has just been getting away from me lately. Like Remi is turning four this year and I’m actually in tears watching her grow up.”

“It must be hard.” Dan says, his voice a bit stiff. “The owner of this shop, Gina, has a son Lucas and he’s a handful but he’s growing so fast. I remember the day he was born and now he’s going to pre-k next year.”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? How fast time goes when you’re out of high school.”

Dan nods with a smile. Because it is true and it only becomes more and more painfully aware when he thinks about how he is 24 years old and painfully single.

Phil finishes paying and then says his goodbyes with a ‘it was good seeing you’. As the door chime shut and Dan is left alone again, a few tears spring to his eyes that he wills to hold down because it was just another stupid crush coming to light. And he didn’t want that to effect him. He knew long ago that Phil wouldn’t feel the same way and it’s certain he won’t now so Dan needs to accept that.

Even if it hurts him a bit more to know that Phil has a daughter and he was going to be fixing a bouquet of pink for her birthday.

***

The flower shop gets a call from Phil one day later. Dan expects the worst with the call. He’d been working on Phil and his daughter Remi’s flowers endlessly the last day. He doesn’t answer the call because he hears the phone from where he is water the hydrangeas but Gina does.

It turns out Phil needs the flowers delivered to his house on Friday at 9am because he isn’t going to have time to pick them up at the store. Gina originally tells Dan she’ll do it by dropping off her son at daycare and then swinging by the Lester residence but Dan asks to do it instead.

“I can do it.”

“You’re going to get up before 8 on a tomorrow to deliver flowers by 9 at a home twenty minutes away?”

“Yeah.”

Gina just scoffs and laughs a bit. “Okay mate. If you do this, I’ll pay you overtime.”

Dan just nods and smiles with a slight blush as he takes Phil’s address and sets it aside with the order. He then prepares a few more things for it before leaving to go home to his sad apartment for a sad lunch with his pet goldfish.

On Friday morning, Dan wakes up early, 6:30 to be exact, and gets ready. He styles his hair, something he never does, and then wets down his face, cleaning it and washing it to get some of the oils from his skin that sometimes like to accumulate when he’s anxious. He takes the time to get dressed nicely and then he leaves his flat with his car keys in hand and drives to Gina’s.

He can normally walk to Gina’s in just fifteen minutes but since he needed his car this morning, he double parked it in front of the shop and walked inside to get the order ready to go. He gets his car situated and everything ready and secured at just around quarter after eight and he leaves with his GPS telling him the way.

He makes his way out of the small town to a rural area just outside of the suburbs. He’s still driving down the street when the GPS tells him to make a turn down a short road and he ends up at a small ranch home surrounded by trees.

It’s cute, Dan presumes. It’s isolated and small but it looks great and Dan pulls into the driveway of the home just as the front door opens and Phil walks out. Dan parks his car and gets out, walking halfway to Phil.

“Thank you so much for being able to bring the flowers to my house.” Phil says. “Remi’s mom is…well, she’s not being fair right now and so I have to leave and pick up Remi by 10 and I would have never made it to pick up the flowers, bring them home, and then go and pick her up for her party.”

Dan feels his stomach clench and roll. So, Remi’s mom didn’t live with Phil…which meant they were separated?

“…you can bring the flowers inside for right now. I have a table all set.”

Dan snaps out of his thoughts to smile up at Phil and open the trunk of his car so they could take out the flower arrangements. Dan helped bring them inside Phil’s home and they set them on a table in the living room which had photos of Remi from the time she was a baby to one that was clearly taken not that long ago. Dan couldn’t help but look at how she looked so much like Phil. Her hair was red but she had stunning bright blue eyes and cheekbones to match.

The cake was sitting in the middle with the cover on it and it read “Happy 8th Birthday, Remi!” and it was decorated with little flowers and roses all over.

“Remi is going to be 8th this year.” Phil says. “I have such a hard time believing my little girl has gotten so much older. I remember when Alyssa called me on the phone and told me Remi was born, it was so surreal. I still remember what it was like to hold her for the first time. She was so small and fragile.”

Dan’s lips curled into a smile as he looked at Phil and Phil’s cheeks flushed red a bit. “She looks like you.”

Phil lets out a laugh. “She actually is a spitting image of Alyssa. I can’t look at Remi without thinking of her mother.” Phil pauses. “It’s both a blessing and a…”

Dan knows what Phil was about to say but maybe in this case it was best to leave certain things unsaid.

“Do you have any children, Dan?”

Dan shook his head and bit his lip. “Ah…no, I’m um…I’m gay.”

He sucks in a breath and waits for anything Phil might say back to him but just as soon as it looks like Phil might say something, Phil’s phone starts ringing and he leaves the room to answer it.

Dan looks around, looking at all of the pictures on the wall of Remi and Phil. There are no photos of Phil with anyone else but Remi. In fact, it doesn’t look like there are even any signs that anyone else lives here besides Phil and Remi.

Phil comes back just seconds later and lets out an apology. “Alyssa is asking to meet me early so I have to go now. Thank you for bringing the flowers here. I know it was probably super ridiculous to do this but it means a lot.”

“It’s really not a problem.”

They exchange a quick glance and Dan’s about to turn to leave when Phil brings him in for a tight hug. He releases Dan quickly and they both blush and Phil motions that he’s leaving so Dan follows him out and they leave right after each other.

***

“Get the flowers to the Lester Residence okay?”

Dan nods at Gina as he walks through the door and ends up at the counter.

“Of course.”

Gina gave him a knowing look. “Was there a reason you were so eager to take the flowers to Mr. Lester?”

Dan felt his mouth fall open and he quickly shook his head. “No! No. There is nothing going on…he’s…”

“Dan, you’re blushing like mad, babes.”

“He’s an old high school friend that I used to have a crush on.” Dan says and Gina coos. “But he’s straight and has a daughter and she was who the flowers were for.”

“And you two didn’t steal a cheeky kiss in the front door before you left?”

“Gina!”

She waved him off with a laugh. “I’m just taking the piss, babes.” She twirls a strand of her loose hair in her fingers. “Are you sure he’s straight?”

“Why else would he have a daughter?” Dan asks.

“Sweetie, you’re being a bit ridiculous.” She says. “Gay men can have children. Maybe it was a one night slip up. Or maybe he did fall in love with a woman for a short time. A man can have a daughter with a woman and then decide he wants to be with men instead.”

Dan feels a blush creep up his cheeks because Gina is completely correct.

The conversation ends and he spends the rest of his shift helping Gina rearrange some of the displays in her store and assist a few straggling customers.

Later that day when he goes home, he gets a message on Facebook from Phil Lester.

**Phil Lester: **Just wanted to tell you Remi loved her flowers!

Attached is a photo of his daughter stood in front of the table with a massive grin on her face. Her hair is pulled up in messy dutch braids and her glasses on her nose are slightly skewed but something in his heart swells a bit when he sees the photo.

**Dan Howell: **I’m so glad!

**Phil Lester: **Excuse me if this is too creepy or weird but…would you like to get coffee sometime? I’d like to catch up.

***

Despite how his anxiety was welling higher and higher as he walked to the cafe on the corner of first and main, Dan was still excited to meet up with Phil to catch up. It had been two weeks since Phil messaged him about the flowers but he had to wait to meet up with Remi went back to her mom’s for the weekend.

But now here he is, opening the door and seeing Phil sat at a table in the corner, his lips sipping from a black mug. Dan lets out a deep breath and walks over to him, a small hop in his step.

“Hey.”

Phil looks up from his coffee and smiles. “Hey.”

“How are you?”

“Could be better.” Phil answers. “Dropping Remi off is always really hard.”

Dan sits down in the chair across from Phil and lets a sympathetic look come across his face. “I’m sorry.”

Phil shrugs. “It’s okay. Alyssa and I have been co-parenting Remi since she was born so it’s something I’m used to but it hurts more and more the older she gets.” Phil shakes his head. “But you don’t want to hear about this. Tell me about what you’ve been up to since we last spoke.”

And Dan does. He tells Phil about high school and how he was salutatorian and then he tells Phil how he tried going to college but realized it wasn’t for him and got a dead end job at Urban Outfitters for a few years before he found his job with Gina who was a coworker he had from UO.

They finally get on the topic of relationships and Dan goes first. “I had a boyfriend for a few years but we wanted two different things in life. He wanted to party and get drunk every night and have drunken sex and I wanted to actually live my life and it didn’t work.”

Phil shook his head. “My ex was the same way. He wanted to spend more time hanging onto me and clinging onto me but any time I told him about Remi, he recoiled. He never wanted to meet her and it hurt because Remi will always be the first person in my life before anyone else.”

Dan tried to not linger on the word ‘he’ but he couldn’t help it.

“Remi is such an important part of your life,” Dan says. “If someone doesn’t want to meet her, they don’t belong in yours.”

Phil smiled at Dan and nodded. There was a silence between them for a moment before Phil looks up from his gaze at the table and smiles. “Dan?”

“Yeah.”

“Would I be too forward to ask if you would let me take you out on a date this weekend?”

***

They date for two months before Dan is introduced to Remi. Phil explains that he wants to make sure that Dan is serious about taking on a commitment of being in Remi’s life with Phil and he agrees almost instantly. Of course their relationship is new but they both knew from the moment they walked out of the coffee shop that they were supposed to have met again. It was fate telling them so.

They both felt the connection.

Their first date, they wind up at Dan’s apartment and it’s the best sex Dan’s ever had and despite all of that, waking up next to Phil convinces Dan that he’s the man he wants to wake up to the rest of his life.

The day Dan meets Remi, they go to the park together and he watches and plays with Remi on the swings as Phil watches. At the end of the day, Remi gives him a hug and then tells Phil how much she likes him and it makes a tear come from Dan’s eyes.

One year after they start dating, Dan moves in with Phil and Remi begins to call him her step-dad. He meets Alyssa and he feels more than happy when she welcomes him with open arms into Remi’s life. She even says she remembers him from high school.

And Dan still works at the flower shop with Gina but now instead of staring out the window and wondering where his life is going, he gets to stare at his ring finger and think about where his future is heading with Phil and Remi by his side.

And all of this happened because Phil came to them to do her flowers for her birthday.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this fic, leave a comment and some kudos and drop me a message on my tumblr @yiffandquiff!


End file.
